Weeknotes S01E03
This is my third weeknote, I realise that I’ve forgotten every other time to tell you who I am! I assume that it’ll only be people I actually know reading these ramblings, but just in case:
A bit about me
I work for the Australian government as the lead user research librarian. I’m ostensibly a user researcher, but the only people I research these days are researchers.* I’m also a PhD student at the University of Queensland and my thesis is looking at a specific type of parental leave.** Broadly, I’m interested in the things that create the environment for change. I think our societies are structurally inequitable, and I think we can do better.
I am the chair, co-chair or lead of several working groups and communities, and I guess I write a lot about those, because I can. The communities I’m most involved with are: The ResearchOps Community, the Australian Government Linked Data Working Group, the Australian Government User Research Libraries Community, the International Vocabularies/Linked Data Interest Group and One Team Gov. I suspect the fact that I live on a tiny island has a great deal to do with the way I’m so outwards facing, and so ultra-connected. Life on a tiny island forces you to always look outwards, so it doesn’t feel odd or scary.
So the tiny island I’m referencing is Tasmania. I have two boys, my husband, a dog and a very large family. Here’s a regular kind of view from one of the beaches (it’s an island, beaches are everywhere!). If you see my photos on Twitter much, you’ll notice the outward view:
What did you do?
Not an exhaustive list
Monday
Monday was the first day back at work. Lots of emails. Oh! I held a beautiful baby because our fabulous library curator has been on maternity leave for 3 months, and decided to come for a visit. He was gorgeous and she was her incredible self. I miss her so. She’ll be back in a year, and time flies, or so I keep telling myself.
Tuesday
Tuesday was the governance catch up for the ResearchOps ‘Research Repos’ project, but it was just the leads preparing for this week’s upcoming workshop, and so I got to sleep in :-)
It was my uni day, but also involved a trip to the dentist. Boo.
I’ve recently made my participant target for my studies, but now have to interview all 50 people, so that’s creating the need for some logistics and organising the operations side of my own research, including managing the synthesis and analysis of all that data. Like any typical researcher, I did it on paper. Like any typical researcher, I’m now needing to digitize that work and it is a hard slog. Worthwhile, but hard. Keeps me sympathetic to the researchers in my life!
Wednesday
Big work day, nothing to report
Thursday
On Sunday and Thursday, the ResearchRepos leads chatted about making a framework for the project. It will give us a bit of structure and should help us get through the process more easily, I hope. I’d wanted very much to be absolutely open, explicitly not bringing my preconceptions to the table, but doing that ignores the fact that we have 100 people in one space who’ve all been doing this for years, and we probably have been around the block enough times to be able to suggest these are some roads we ought to go down. Plus, removing those preconceptions was proving to be confusing for everyone else. So we’re working on a framework. From my own research perspective, I am not fully postmodern about my approaches (more of a constructivist), and therefore prefer to review known knowns, create high-level questions based around the aims of the project and a conceptual framework for the research, and then go from there. User research tends to be much more postmodern (hence user-led), so we needed to talk that through. It’s all very meta, creating a conceptual framework for researching other people’s conceptual frameworks to then understand how to categorise their research, but that’s how we roll in ReOps.
algazel and Dana have it in hand though and will keep us in the right exploratory modes, I feel sure.
Friday
Biggish day at work. It is past planning time, but changes put me a bit behind, so I’m doing what I enjoy the most, checking back in with long term goals and checking our course, if we need to change tack (spoiler: we do).
On Thursday night/Friday am, the OneTeamGov Global pitch to the Nesta Radical Visions for the Future of Government went live, after months of work with the lovely Sam Villis at the helm, pulling it all together. OTG Aus had a part to play in that, and I can see our work in there too and it made me feel hopeful for the sorts of stuff we can get done when we work together. Have a read, I dare you to be inspired:
What are you thinking about?
Not an exhaustive list
Community. I’m thinking about how to build communities when maybe there are no incentives for people to work together. What is working in the ones I’m in now, what needs to change. I finally finished the pitch for the Connected Communities project I’m hoping to run in the Linked Data Working Group, and I finally finished making notes on a meeting I ran a couple of weeks ago with some folks who are not on social media or ever likely to read a blog, but are changing the world with persistence and passion. I hope my notes did them justice and will help push them forward.
I’m thinking about my study and how completely and utterly structurally unsound our societies are these days.
Today (Sunday) was spent writing about the cold hard stones in the pit of my stomach (you’ll need to read this thread to see):
They’re the stones that aren’t dissolved by a UBI or by organisational policies, or even government policies. They’re the stones of needing to have and do it all in a world that expects that, but doesn’t create the environment for it to be possible, and then demands to know why we’re failing at having and doing it all, when all the while ignoring the stones and their weight. It was a heavy thing to write, and even heavier because it was the introduction to my thesis, finally taking shape. Introductions to theses these days are all about the researcher, and mine is a vulnerable read. I’ll have to see if I’m brave enough to leave it in.
Anything else?
I read and tweeted about some interesting things:
aimee whitcroft shared this book which I’m yet to get my teeth into, but must indeed do that: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/non-invasive-data-governance/9781935504870/
Some ResearchOps folks shared the ODI’s data ethics canvas, and there’s so much associated work, it looks amazing: https://theodi.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/ODI-Data-Ethics-Canvas-2019-05.pdf
This fantastic report on legislation as code in NZ:
~fin~
*these odd meta things are dotted throughout my life, this is just one
**I promise Gillian if you’re reading this that I’ve done some work today.
